>Cloud gaming means you will be able to take your game “everywhere” and avoid dreaded 20-minute updates before you can start playing.
Doubt. In the same way that movies on PSP had this idea in mind but fell flat on it's face, games are strongly tied to the format and environment in which you consume them.
FPS gaming with a keyboard and mouse isn't coming with you on your phone for the morning commute, and no amount of technology is going to change that because the main barrier is you won't want to play that game on your morning commute with a bunch of people around you, noise, and being unable to immerse yourself (even for reasons as simple as needing to remember to get off at your stop).
That said, perhaps the converse doesn't hold true, and when you flop down in front of your screen in the evening you can get into a 6h marathon of bejeweled just the same as you were playing on the train into work that morning. Streaming isn't an enabler for this though, just cross-platform builds of your chosen game and cross-format suitability for input/output methods.
>Microsoft claims Game Pass subscribers increase their overall playtime by 40%
I'd really like to see retention stats alongside this to drawn an inference, because (anecdotally), I subscribed, played the shit out of the one game I subscribed for, then cancelled my sub before the next month. I definitely look like a player with increased playtime, because I deliberately did that to play a game that would have cost $$ for just $.
> FPS gaming with a keyboard and mouse isn't coming with you on your phone for the morning commute, and no amount of technology is going to change that because the main barrier is you won't want to play that game on your morning commute with a bunch of people around you, noise, and being unable to immerse yourself (even for reasons as simple as needing to remember to get off at your stop).
PUBG and Fortnite are both wildly popular mobile games. I see people playing them on the bus all the time.
> PUBG and Fortnite are both wildly popular mobile games. I see people playing them on the bus all the time.
Incidentally, neither of these are an FPS. Both using (or favouring, in the case of PUBG) third person, over-the-shoulder play.
However video game “genres” are kind of a mess. FPS is too broad of a label to be useful. Both CoD and Portal are “FPS” but feature wildly different pace, tone, and requirements on the player. Another example: there’s a type of “FPS” that is almost extinct because it’s only really playable on PC: the arena shooter or twitch shooter (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Quake 3). These are simply not playable on console/mobile because the speed and precision of inputs required to play them is beyond the inputs available.
All of this is to say that the type of “FPS” you might get on mobile won’t represent the full range of FPS experiences you can get on PC or console.
PUBG mobile is (or was? haven't played in a while) a work of art - especially compared to it's PC older brother. Runs at a solid FPS, amazing gunplay for a mobile game while still capturing the essence of the PC game. Slightly embarrassing for PUBG PC to be frank.
But... both technically and culturally it's not the same as a PC shooter. Similar to comparing HALO with a game like Counter Strike I guess - one summer I was bored and shot 2500-3000ish heads (Aim Botz) in one sitting but I can't imagine "practicing" PUBG mobile in a similar way.
As an aside, I played pubg from early days, and as buggy as the PC version was, I was shocked when out of curiosity I tried pubg on a pixel 2 and it actually ran smoothly.
I thought much the same but recent experiences with my cousin's children give me doubt. They're both in the early teens now and they consume games like Minecraft on their iPad as if they were playing on a standard PC.
I know the games have been tweaked for the format but not by much, at least in the instance of Minecraft.
The virtual controls infuriate me but they're tapping and swiping away building some complex creations. They do this in the middle of a family social, necks bent, staring down at the screen. The only time they look away is when the iPad runs out of juice.
Maybe it's because they haven't tried any better and so don't know how the constrained controls are limiting their gameplay?
I see a lot of this in other fields. People will use a sub-standard workflow and think it's fine until they experience something better and at that point they realise how bad their previous workflow was.
This article discusses many of the pain points Google Stadia was supposed to solve, but didn't mention that Stadia has had significant issues since (e.g. input latency, bandwidth consumption) that the positives do not offset.
Those are technical problems that will get solved. Heck, I helped solve some of them 5 years ago with Microsoft in a limited pilot but the solution wasn't cost-effective back then. They didn't want to be first to market with a half-baked product for fear it would damage the Xbox brand. Google is starting a new brand for Stadia, so it makes sense they'd be willing to take more risk.
Stadia DOES solve those problems... over a particular range of conditions - and its a respectably wide range. It can't heal shitty internet though, but who said it can?
I used to laugh at the idea of playing games on a tiny screen, especially AAA titles. But I was gifted a Nintendo Switch and I've used it almost exclusively in handheld mode. I played the entirety of Breath of the Wild on planes, morning commutes, and heck, even the bathroom.
That's a gorgeous game that probably deserves a big screen experience. But the convenience of being able to play anytime, anywhere trumps the cumbersomeness of sitting before a TV, switching everything on, and using a controller.
> FPS gaming with a keyboard and mouse isn't coming with you on your phone for the morning commute
People are playing games on their phones on trains and buses and cars all day every day. Mouse and Keyboard FPS games have given way to the control pads on phone touchscreens.
One benefit of being so old and traveled is that I can predict the future more reliably than 40 years ago. Look to dense urban centers for entertainment consumption efficiency and life hacks and you are looking at the future of the culture, even if another wave breaks that pattern a short time later.
Yes density is the hot new thing I agree. The mouse and KB didn't give way. They don't compete with each other. Nobody is deciding to play civ6 on their phone instead of their PC when at home. People play phone games when they are not at a desk where they can game. Gaming diverged, following the hardware.
I was surprised/annoyed by this as a very casual gamer—my sister lent me her Xbox One a few weeks ago, and I have a copy of Halo (Master Chief Collection). I wanted to play it for a few minutes just to relive some memories from Halo CE and see how the remastered graphics looked.
It took like 20 minutes for the game to copy from the disc to internal storage (luckily her Xbox had some free space!), and then it spent another 10 or so downloading an update/patch.
Back when I remember playing Sega, Nintendo, etc. (even Xbox 360, which was the last console I owned), it was a matter of plugging in a cartridge/disc, turning on the system, and playing the game after a few boot screens.
In the end, I only got about 20 minutes of time to play the game since it was night and I had to be up early to help the kids. The experience didn't make me anxious to buy a modern gaming system.
I had a comical situation happen a few years ago when I went to a friends house.
Tried to play Halo on his xbox one, something he played almost daily. Required an update which took maybe 10 minutes. Got in and realized we couldn't play local split screen online. Fine, he has a gaming pc, let's fire that up and play with his Rift.
Pc has an update, then steam needed some kind of update, and Oculus did, and then the damn game we wanted to play had it's own update. We just sat there laughing as all in all it took an hour from when we sat down to actually playing something.
If you're not playing regularly, the amount of updates that can happen are insane.
I've started a process of starting our XBox One about every month, or even three weeks, so that any console updates are done before my wife (main player by about a 90/10 split) has to wait 45 minutes for download/validate/apply cycle.
If she has a game in, I start it as well, same reason.
I like the idea that they are both getting security and/or bug fixes (I'm looking at you, Bethesda) but yeah damn, it's a pain to wait an hour to start playing anymore.
All of them. At least from a console/dual boot perspective. Maybe if the game updates in the background this isn’t true.
But really. Every 3 weeks when I get time to play I spend 40~ minutes updating the game on PS4 because the patch sizes are gigabytes and the harddisk is slow.
The situation is only /slightly/ improved on a dual boot setup but then it’s also complaining about windows updates too, so not much time is actually won there.
It's not a huge deal if automatic updates work as expected. I've have too many times where my Playstation fails to auto-update and I'm stuck waiting an hour+ for an update.
I will take this one. I use my ps4 mostly for netflix, but recent holiday season left me with some games. You would be surprised how often those games force you into updates. And then there is PS system updates..
>>Cloud gaming means you will be able to take your game “everywhere” and avoid dreaded 20-minute updates before you can start playing.
The problem is latency.
In a world where I am not even happy with the latency, or delay on most of the Code Editor, Keyboard, Screen, Display etc. And Gaming Display Monitor being 120Hz and trending towards 240hz+. We are not even anywhere close to solving latency issues in a local environment, let alone one that is separated by a fibre Optic.
And I not sure about "dreaded" the 20min update, on a decent Internet connection, most of the time is no longer in the network, but CPU decompressing the Data and installing it. But they way update are package are still optimise for minimal bandwidth, not minimal user time.
I dont think the problem with Gaming industry is Distribution or Delivery with Cloud Gaming. It is with the forever increase in Asset Prices. Middleware Engine helped Software Gaming Development cost to stabilise. But the Asset, especially Graphics will need ways to dramatically reduce its time and cost.
> We are not even anywhere close to solving latency issues in a local environment, let alone one that is separated by a fibre Optic.
Actually, this is more or less solved. https://parsecgaming.com/ works really well over a local network. I use a raspberry pi as a thin client to stream games to my tv from a windows vm in my closet. I cant even tell a difference. Its not just for games either; its basically a gpu accelerated remote desktop.
They claim it works really well for remote servers (they even let you lease environments I think) too. For less intensive games, it probably works fine, but for more latency sensitive games, Im sure you can feel the lag.
Everywhere in this context might not mean in your commute.
One of my gaming friends who is a big fan of Stadia loves it because it means that even though they travel a lot, they will be able to play [enter big aaa pc game] from the comfort of their hotel room (they travel a lot).
Personally, I think I might be tempted to use stadia for another reason : I love FPSs but I have abandoned pc gaming in favor of consoles. I will try to use Stadia in order to play Doom eternal : this way I can play with a mouse and keyboard without having to invest the time, money, space and energy to build a gaming pc.
> Doubt. In the same way that movies on PSP had this idea in mind but fell flat on it's face, games are strongly tied to the format and environment in which you consume them.
I used to have a cheaper laptop back in the olden days so I subscribed to a service called OnLive. It worked like Stadia where the cloud would host and render your game and you could play it online. I loved it! I wish it hadn't gotten bought out and canceled. Doesn't work for certain types of games, obviously, but it's great for most casual things.
I use my Oculus Go and now Quest often in the commute, a big screen with virtualdesktop and/or a gamepad works, even a bluetooth keyboard. And then there is VR gaming...
You probably live in a bubble, because people use the switch and the xbox to watch movies, and use their phones to play shooters and other games that could really use a mouse+keyboard.
Obviously not my thing but we can’t ignore the rest of the world.
Fortnite's not an FPS... More seriously, I think this is meant to imply a game like Quake or Counter Strike ("Skill based") rather than Fortnite - i.e. Fortnite has aspects unlike those other two games that cultivate different skills.
There's a point that the article only brushes on that seems important.
My generation (born in early 70's) was the first to really come up with access to video games pretty much as a given. We had space invaders etc in the arcades (or wherever else they could fit a cabinet), hand-held Nintendo and basic home consoles in primary school and then of course came the boom with PC, PS, X-Box and all that followed.
But a lot of people only a few years older than me are just as dismissive about games now as they were then - this is kids' stuff, a waste of time and money. I'm not an obsessive gamer, but I do play every now and then and I absolutely see games as just another option on the entertainment landscape.
And being that older people weren't into them, I guess I'd always had the thought in the back of my mind that games were something you grew out of, like binge drinking or not caring about your retirement (your examples may vary). But the other day I was playing with friends and I looked around at these ~50 year olds and realised we're never going to "grow out" of this - particularly if the hardware and software just keep improving the way they have.
So for me one of the big reasons that gaming will keep growing is because those older, non-gaming generations will die out, replaced by new generations who start gaming ever earlier while eventually you may find yourself playing call of duty with a platoon of 80+ year-olds.
I'm mixed on this. I grew up with games, similar age as you. I haven't completely stopped but I'm down to a 2-3 games a year. Why? Because they are all the same damn game!!! FPS # 12446, 2D side scroller # 692134, Yet another twin stick shooter, Yet another shmups, Yet another Metroidvania, etc... They aren't changing enough to hold my interest.
Even games that seem "new" don't feel new. I played "Baba is You". Got maybe 50 levels in. It did have new ideas but at its core it felt like I was playing Adventures of Lolo NES from the mid 80s.
VR has added "presence" and being in new places feels novel as well as using hands instead of joypads but there's so few good well made titles and I'm sure that novelty will wear off as well.
I've tried to compare this to movies and TV. I'm not tired of movies and TV. I think the biggest difference is games are about the game, movies and TV are about the story. Games can have good stories but the majority are pretty crap and generally the more story the less game. I don't generally play for the story.
Have you tried Disco Elisium, by any chance? I'm in a very similar position - despite spending my whole professional life in gamedev, I'm mostly disillusioned in games right now. Especially from story perspective: too many titles seem to be written with the same old tropes targeted at teens, at best.
But among all the games that tried to challenge this in the last 10-15 years, Disco Elisium did it the best. It's not just a good story in a shape of a game: it's a very engaging gameplay, built very organically around a story and it's world and characters.
Maybe that's an ancillary point to that of the article. Games aren't near being fully explored as a medium, and both storyline and gameplay elements have a huge space of potential that hasn't been explored yet.
It's promising that there's many indie games that really push the frontiers of the gaming experiences one can have. E.g. This War of Mine and Firewatch were really big experiences for me, in terms of what stories a game can tell while being quite novel on the gameplay front.
I don't buy it. It's not like every single episode in every single TV series is completely mind-blowingly different than everything else. At this point you've probably seen all the tropes, seen all the plot twists. I also doubt that TV series are captivating because of the story. They're more about the characters, and how you either like them or like to dislike them, or how their experiences make you feel. With the advent of mass-produced media, story no longer has the unifying role within a culture that it once had, we no longer care about the moral of a story, on the contrary we'd rather there weren't any. Story has been downgraded to a vehicle for emotion, or for a punchline in the case of Seinfeld.
And sure, I also play a lot less than I used to. But there are still fantastic games out there worth playing. I loved Hollow Knight and Cuphead and Hyper Light Drifter. And they all were created by people who grew up with the same games as I did.
I like to keep connected I guess. I kind of feel like games have grown up with me, too, almost in parallel.
When I was a kid they were simple and clumsy. I hit puberty in the 80s as games started to come into their own and the industry formed a bit of an identity. In my 20's (the 90's) there was this flurry of activity and games started to be a bit cool and not just for kids and geeks.
By my 30's, games had started making a bit of money and the industry got more professional. Now I'm in my 40's and gaming is kind of bloated and complacent and compromised, but still capable of amazing things, much more amazing than 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
Plus gaming is one of our generation's biggest contributions to culture. Really, it's that and hip hop. Everything else is just a sub genre, but those are two sensational contributions, imo.
Games can create worlds, and the feeling of being present in that world, sometimes better than movies. It is not just about the plot and gameplay. Atmosphere plays a big role.
For examples, try Paris and Sapienza missions in Hitman 2016. Or GTA 5, which will be an amazing snapshot of what 2010s were like in the US.
Well to be fair, the same is true of films and tv. Story arc# 1234, character development #2, twist #3.
I am not sure though if it is true of books though. Possibly because the information is much more in books than can be fitted into a 2 hour film / 40 hour game.
I'm a tad younger than you and I'd like your opinion. I stopped caring about the gaming industry because
1) even if it's entertainment, I think the deep value is .. as a kid thing. It's not dismissive, I just think that gaming value has limits. It's a dreamy world you interact with and that fits the younger brain. As adults you'd rather master the real world more.
2) I find games today not much more original than in the past, it plateau-ed somehow [0] and they're mostly selling more technical oomph to justify new things.
[0] to be honest I interact very lightly with games, only a cousin younger than I show me some stuff, this plus the fads you can hear about online.
Do you really think a PS5 game will be that much more enjoyable than a PS2 game ? The other question .. well you answered it. You and your friends are still into them.
> Do you really think a PS5 game will be that much more enjoyable than a PS2 game
Can be, absolutely.
I played Read Dead Redemption 2 last year. There's a wild west cowboy outlaw game in there somewhere with a storyline that you can finish, but what completely blew my mind is how stunningly beautiful it is, how beautiful the world you're riding around in is, and how ugly human encroachment on nature is. Because as time progresses in the game, the frontier moves a little bit further, more trees are felled, more clearings made, more houses built, more railway tracks are laid, more humans, more civilization, more stinking cities.
You absolutely could not make a game like that on a PS2. You need a 4K screen and hi-res textures and HDR lighting to really make the world pretty, to really make you care about that world.
I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch as well. It's also an open-world game, and because it has infinite draw distance, they've managed to craft a world where no matter where you stand, you can see something interesting in the distance. I have never played a game that made me be so excited to explore and to get sidetracked as that game. The actual gameplay is also expertly bite-sized, so it doesn't matter if you play for 15 minutes or 15 hours, you still have the same sense of progression.
You absolutely could not make a game like that on a GameCube. You need hardware enough to do a seamless open world with infinite draw distance and no loading screens, otherwise the experience just doesn't work, just wouldn't be able to show you all it has to offer all at once.
LIke I say, I'm not a hardcore gamer so I don't know if I'm best qualified to answer your questions, but basically...
1) Everything has its limits. There are seven basic plots[0] and while human creativity has an amazing ability to retell them in different ways, after a while you definitely start to see patterns. The real world is great and I definitely keep up with current affairs etc, but if you look too closely in any direction things are kind of messed up. Sometimes a dreamy world is a nice place to be, particularly if you can get there without risking too much damage to yourself.
2) I guess every art form is constrained by its boundaries - you could say that nothing much has happened in portaiture in the last 600 years. I think that story telling is getting better in gaming, and player choice and branching is definitely something that keeps pushing outwards. The whole online/collaborative scene is something that we've wanted from the start and is really only being solved satisfactorily now.
> Do you really think a PS5 game will be that much more enjoyable than a PS2 game?
Not necessarily - some old games are great, and the whole retro-gaming craze is a testament to this - but that will only feed the cumulative growth of games. People will be playing the classics and the new releases.
1) I don't see it. All adults I know who aren't into gaming still enjoy non-real world things for entertainment. Be they books, movies, sports, TV, etc. You work at mastering your profession, raising your kids, and all the other real world stuff and sometimes you just want to enjoy life.
2) Yes and no. I think this comes around to the fact that there are only so many stories and that there have been original games but they tend not to be big. The big genres in games have been pretty well defined and while original things do get introduced, most are refinements. Also execution matters much more than original content in games and that seems to be hit and miss.
Personally I went through a period of about 15 years where I gamed very little. A time when my kids were young and work was much more demanding. I got back into gaming maybe 6-7 years back when my kids were old enough to have their own interests and I professionally became confident enough that I didn't need constant study. So it might be something that changes as you grow.
I recently started gaming after a good 8-10 years of non gaming. I installed Dirt Rally and bought a racing wheel controller. It is a blast to drive in a simulator-like game. I don't think it is a game I would've have enjoyed as a kid or a teen. The current gaming landscape is broad and covers more niches than ever before. Explore games that align with your interests.
Your 1st argument could be made for watching television. Television shows also range from self-learning to toddler cartoons to historical dramas.
I am surprised many of my non-gaming friends/relatives, even if they do not play themselves, do not seem to be absolutely amazed by modern games. The fact that we can have such rich worlds as GTA 5, affordable to so many, run in one's living room, with such amazing graphics and overall richness, that we can control and interact with, rendered in 4k in real time! Even as a tech person I find that almost unbelievable. And all of that created in such a short period of time, too!
To me, it seems like an absolutely astonishing achievement of humanity, one of the marvels of this world. Completely mindblowing. And yet the reaction I get from a lot of people, e.g. my older relatives, but also people in their 30s and 40s, is of complete indifference - "meh, games are for kids". I struggle to understand that.
I interact less with games not because I don't like playing them but because I have far less time for them. Honestly, I do casual games a lot more simply because they are easier to pick up and put down.
Nigh 50 year old reporting in - I agree 100%. Some of my fondest memories are related to video games, and I still have friends I've never met in real life that I enjoy more than many people I have. My wife, son, and I are a gamer family, and I think better because of it. I had very little connections to my parents (who were great) at the level my wife and I have with our son (11). We laugh and joke about gaming, share memes, and watch each other play. We also do other things together (hikes, fishing, board games etc), but I see people that don't play video games in the same light as those that don't watch movies or don't listen to music or don't read books - they're missing a fascinating part of life.
While I think games are an underused medium for advertising and promoting, I'm not sure about any claim of it "taking over." Mobile games on the rise and all that, blah blah. From my own experience, as my purchasing power has grown, my gaming time has declined. I did play a lot of Breath of the Wild. However, I have another couple of games I'd like to play, but I just don't have the time.
Most people play less games as their income goes up, but they also watch less TV. They have less time. TV was mostly watched by kids and is watched by the elderly (Fox News / CBS). When you are old you may find yourself watching less Fox News and playing more Nintendo?
I'm a huge gamer (and make both video games and board games in my spare time), but as I get older, I'm also playing less games yet watching more TV (or Youtube or podcasts).
TV is something I can have on while I work on responsibilities around the house (dishes, cooking, putting things away, for example), while eating dinner, and in the background while I'm working on graphic design or programming for various personal projects.
I can't do those things and play games at the same time, like I can with TV. Sure I could watch other people play games via Twitch, but that just tends to annoy me because those people waste so much time doing what I wouldn't do, or trying to figure things out, or saying dumb crap to try to gain an audience, so I've never really gotten into it (I know I'm in the minority there).
I do still play games, but it's a lot less time than it used to be.
I've experienced the same. Breath of the Wild and Red Dead Redemption 2 are the only recent games that got any notable amount of playtime from me. I still buy many games once they get down to $5-$10. God of War and Spiderman were my most recent purchases since they just got down below $10, who knows if I'll ever actually play those.
The truly big games, in terms of hours played, seems to be online multiplayer. MMORPG, FPS, whatever DOTA is... those are the games where some people start putting in 1000+ hours per year. Problem is close to everyone can enjoy TV and movies, not everyone wants to do eSports.
The article is less about how much people play in an absolute sense, but more about how much people play compared to how much time they spend watching television (and streaming services like Netflix).
You say that your gaming time has declined. Has your time watching tv declined comparably? Which of the two - gaming or tv - would you say is more important in your life?
> You say that your gaming time has declined. Has your time watching tv declined comparably? Which of the two - gaming or tv - would you say is more important in your life?
My gaming has declined to zero, and my time watching TV has increased greatly. TV is much easier to make into a shared experience than video games. You can also find informative non-fiction TV, while nearly all games are fiction with relatively simple plots.
I think this article cherrypicks and makes all kinds of wild extrapolations to get to the unwarranted conclusion that gaming will "take over." The most glaring in my mind it doesn't address the kinds of lifestyle changes that happen as people age, that are extremely relevant to the overall uptake of media like video games.
For a medium that has growing revenue, the major players and properties are attempting increasingly manipulative, desperate, awful, and addictive mechanisms to squeeze more revenue.
IMO that just makes more opportunity for indies. I didn't really start exploring indie games actively until I started hating the AAA games that were coming out.
To an extent. Even the most manipulative mechanics have died down amid significant player protest. (e.g. Star Wars Battlefront II)
Case in point: modern console games have been trying to avoid pushing loot box mechanics as much as possible. (mobile gacha games are a bit more complicated, but even those have been made substantially less greedy)
While there are outstanding single player narrative experiences leveraging the format to further the narrative, there's nothing like a good TV show or movie for joint attention.
When enjoying a narrative with friends or a loved one many people will not want to pause to argue furiously over what dialogue choice to make or how to deal with a moral dilemma.
Games are a fantastic medium. But there have limitations, just as every other medium does.
Remember when radio was going to make the written word obsolete? Or TV kill off sound-only formats and movie theaters?
The medium is an integral part of the message. Video games are a new medium that will be added to the mix, not replace it, just as every media before it.
A lot, actually. It is probably easiest way how the couple can do something together, rest and cuddle while doing it and have something to talk about afterwards. You can do it together with kids while browsing on the phone - you are there and available while not forced to participate too much too.
Article seems to forget that there are vast swaths of the population that do not play games. They do not have the patience to learn how to play games, not even console games with simpler controls. Even casual games require some level of skill to play, or they're not any fun, and the joy of television is that you do not need any special skill to enjoy it. This isn't even getting into people who view games as a waste of time, worse than television--at least television can sometimes teach you something, most games do not. You could try to argue that because a lot of children play games, future generations will be more game-focused, but I still don't believe that it's even close to a simple majority of children who like playing games as much as watching video content. Video content will always win because they don't take much (or any) energy (physical, mental, or emotional) to enjoy. I think most people find that you reach a point in the day where you're too tired to literally do anything else (no reading, no gaming) but stare at video until you're ready to fall asleep.
Get in line. People have been making that argument since the dawn of time. Even "writing" was heavily criticized over memorization and oral story telling. Each criticism declaring the end and ruin of civilization.
If I had to pick one of them to actually make this complaint against it would be computer (AI) generated content optimized for clicks on video websites (think kids videos on youtube).
It sounds like you think the OP is making a moral argument against games, but I don't believe they are.
I have no moral issue with time spent on games. My son plays quite a lot and I think that's fine.
I have zero interest in them though. There are a lot of reasons for this, but they aren't moral reasons - just preferences. I'd note that this also reflect in my lack of interest in board/card games.
I know a lot of people like me, from all age groups - they'll watch video content but have no interest in playing games. I think that the article author misses that.
There are a whole new generation of games that are breaking that issue. Overcooked is a coop “cooking” game where you and your friends have to take actions in a kitchen to make orders as they appear on the top of the screen. My 60+ year old parents picked up the 2 button controls with ease. The game is more project management and communication but gamified.
There is a huge population of people who are mobile gamers and it’s not the demographic of 10-20 year olds. It’s middle aged folks.
Something I think about is how there have been outstanding games that the majority of people will never play. Just in recent years - Red Dead I and II, Horizon Zero Dawn, Last of Us, etc. These have quality/polish up with Breaking Bad or any acclaimed movie/TV, but no one else in my extended family would have played a second of any of them. How do you bring that experience to people?
- emotional investment. Experiences like the last of us are much greater than any critically acclaimed tv show imo. And this is because of the limitations of the tv medium. A video game gets you more emotionally invested because you are active when playing. Perhaps interactive movies are a compromise.
- boardgames, websites and UI. Remember back then when all websites were using flash and all looked different? It was pretty cool. Yet you still had to learn a new UI for every website you visited. Nowadays all websites seem to exhibit the same UI and everybody (even my grandmother) is browsing the web. A header, a nav bar, a home button, a register button, a login button, etc. I feel the same about boardgames. When you get into a new boardgame you know you’ll have to 1/ read the rules 2/ play one game to learn and 3/ profit. Videogames are the opposite. Each game is a totally new experience, even in terms of menu or configuration or controller setup. Your friend has a different console? You’ll have to learn a new controller. It’s way harder to invest yourself in videogames, or to start a new videogame.
In the early days of film there were long running serials played that had such a the investment that it had a limited audience. Film became more mainstream as it's format locked down to 1.5-2hr films that busy people could enjoy.
Investing heavily into a long running video game is more intensive than long running film. Finding the right form for those experiences that isn't totalizing in it's presentation could help. A 3hr run and done episode of red dead might be more consumable.
Most people just don't seem interested in video games. You don't "bring it" to them, the same way as you don't bring for example fishing to people who have no interest in it.
I haven't watched a second of breaking bad or most top rated movies. How do you bring that experience to me? Movies and TV shows are just things I rarely have much interest in.
I respect Matt a lot for his continued valuable insight on the streaming universe, but I think he goes into the wrong direction here (probably some confirmation bias involved).
> Most media categories are confined by three challenges. First is their finite length. At a certain point, you reach the last page of a book, last episode of a TV show, or end of a podcast.
This is a feature, not a bug. With the massive, coordinated attack of the attention economy on everyone's focus, I predict a new wave of burned victims who voluntarily eject from "hedonistic treadmill" type games where you play all day long and never reach the end in order to go back to completing wholesome experiences.
There's a whole generation to still discover what an end game screen looks like, but once they've seen a great and hard earned one, it's hard to go back on that satisfaction.
A game can have no ending because it's an endless grinding treadmill (like most pay-to-win mobile games and their most satanic incarnation, gacha games, where they endlessly introduce new characters to milk the player base for money) or it can have no ending because it's a sandbox where you can make your own story, like TES Daggerfall or Ultima Online (Daggerfall did have a main quest with endings but many players choose to just live their life, buy houses, become the leader of factions and so on). Then there are also games that do have a restricted length but they generate very different stories so they have almost endless replayability, like Civilization games or (if I may digress a bit into a totally different thing) AI Dungeon 2.
In the former kind of games, indeed infinite length is not an advantage, but I think in the latter two kinds, it is.
Can we talk about those dreaded twenty minute updates? As someone who no longer has unlimited gaming time to burn, enormous updates that do nothing but make minor balance tweaks are the bane of my gaming experience.
Cloud gaming may help this, but realistically: the fact that you notice updates (on fast internet) is really a tech problem that even local-rendering traditional consoles can solve.
Background updating should be a thing. It is available on every major console. It never works. That can be fixed.
Additionally, there have been rumblings about where innovation is going to surface in the next generation of consoles. One of the more consistent themes is the handling of downloads; it'll be easier for developers to "shard out" their game into the components that, say, a particular mode or level or segment need, in order to get players into the game as quickly as possible. It may be a 50gb game, but you'll only have to download 3gb of it to get started.
We're seeing some of this on the XB1/PS4 today, but usually its very binary: Ready to Play, then Full Download. Next gen consoles will get much more specific and optimized. I believe (don't quote me on this) Sony has outright said that their goal is: you buy a game and you play it instantly, with no cloud rendering/streaming; just really smart handling of downloads and packaging.
The most ironic thing about gaming over the past generation is that games always used to be like this: you buy a disk/cartridge, and you're playing. Nowadays, you buy a disk, the disk has to install to the drive, then there's a day 1 update; its a total mess. We'll see how the next generation looks, but I doubt very much the situation will look much better for people with bad internet. If you've got great internet though, maybe we'll be close to the way it looked in the past.
Readit News
Doubt. In the same way that movies on PSP had this idea in mind but fell flat on it's face, games are strongly tied to the format and environment in which you consume them.
FPS gaming with a keyboard and mouse isn't coming with you on your phone for the morning commute, and no amount of technology is going to change that because the main barrier is you won't want to play that game on your morning commute with a bunch of people around you, noise, and being unable to immerse yourself (even for reasons as simple as needing to remember to get off at your stop).
That said, perhaps the converse doesn't hold true, and when you flop down in front of your screen in the evening you can get into a 6h marathon of bejeweled just the same as you were playing on the train into work that morning. Streaming isn't an enabler for this though, just cross-platform builds of your chosen game and cross-format suitability for input/output methods.
>Microsoft claims Game Pass subscribers increase their overall playtime by 40%
I'd really like to see retention stats alongside this to drawn an inference, because (anecdotally), I subscribed, played the shit out of the one game I subscribed for, then cancelled my sub before the next month. I definitely look like a player with increased playtime, because I deliberately did that to play a game that would have cost $$ for just $.
PUBG and Fortnite are both wildly popular mobile games. I see people playing them on the bus all the time.
Having never played an FPS on my phone, I had to download Call of Duty to see how it worked, being a heavy kb+m FPS player in my youth.
Played a dozen or so rounds in a couple weeks. It worked surprisingly well with plenty of skill gap between the players.
A couple years ago I also tried a MOBA on my phone wondering how that could possibly work on such a small tap-input device
Turns out mobile screen + tap input game UX is well-explored and polished territory.
Now all I want to see is Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis on a phone and I'll agree that nothing is impossible.
Incidentally, neither of these are an FPS. Both using (or favouring, in the case of PUBG) third person, over-the-shoulder play.
However video game “genres” are kind of a mess. FPS is too broad of a label to be useful. Both CoD and Portal are “FPS” but feature wildly different pace, tone, and requirements on the player. Another example: there’s a type of “FPS” that is almost extinct because it’s only really playable on PC: the arena shooter or twitch shooter (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Quake 3). These are simply not playable on console/mobile because the speed and precision of inputs required to play them is beyond the inputs available.
All of this is to say that the type of “FPS” you might get on mobile won’t represent the full range of FPS experiences you can get on PC or console.
The options to play may be increasing, but there’s no way mobile will kill the keyboard players.
But... both technically and culturally it's not the same as a PC shooter. Similar to comparing HALO with a game like Counter Strike I guess - one summer I was bored and shot 2500-3000ish heads (Aim Botz) in one sitting but I can't imagine "practicing" PUBG mobile in a similar way.
They are separate, partitioned instances of the games though, tailored for the format.
I know the games have been tweaked for the format but not by much, at least in the instance of Minecraft.
The virtual controls infuriate me but they're tapping and swiping away building some complex creations. They do this in the middle of a family social, necks bent, staring down at the screen. The only time they look away is when the iPad runs out of juice.
I see a lot of this in other fields. People will use a sub-standard workflow and think it's fine until they experience something better and at that point they realise how bad their previous workflow was.
Stadia DOES solve those problems... over a particular range of conditions - and its a respectably wide range. It can't heal shitty internet though, but who said it can?
That's a gorgeous game that probably deserves a big screen experience. But the convenience of being able to play anytime, anywhere trumps the cumbersomeness of sitting before a TV, switching everything on, and using a controller.
People are playing games on their phones on trains and buses and cars all day every day. Mouse and Keyboard FPS games have given way to the control pads on phone touchscreens.
One benefit of being so old and traveled is that I can predict the future more reliably than 40 years ago. Look to dense urban centers for entertainment consumption efficiency and life hacks and you are looking at the future of the culture, even if another wave breaks that pattern a short time later.
I agree as well though, keyboard and mouse is the superrior interface for me.
It took like 20 minutes for the game to copy from the disc to internal storage (luckily her Xbox had some free space!), and then it spent another 10 or so downloading an update/patch.
Back when I remember playing Sega, Nintendo, etc. (even Xbox 360, which was the last console I owned), it was a matter of plugging in a cartridge/disc, turning on the system, and playing the game after a few boot screens.
In the end, I only got about 20 minutes of time to play the game since it was night and I had to be up early to help the kids. The experience didn't make me anxious to buy a modern gaming system.
Tried to play Halo on his xbox one, something he played almost daily. Required an update which took maybe 10 minutes. Got in and realized we couldn't play local split screen online. Fine, he has a gaming pc, let's fire that up and play with his Rift.
Pc has an update, then steam needed some kind of update, and Oculus did, and then the damn game we wanted to play had it's own update. We just sat there laughing as all in all it took an hour from when we sat down to actually playing something.
If you're not playing regularly, the amount of updates that can happen are insane.
If she has a game in, I start it as well, same reason.
I like the idea that they are both getting security and/or bug fixes (I'm looking at you, Bethesda) but yeah damn, it's a pain to wait an hour to start playing anymore.
But really. Every 3 weeks when I get time to play I spend 40~ minutes updating the game on PS4 because the patch sizes are gigabytes and the harddisk is slow.
The situation is only /slightly/ improved on a dual boot setup but then it’s also complaining about windows updates too, so not much time is actually won there.
It's not a huge deal if automatic updates work as expected. I've have too many times where my Playstation fails to auto-update and I'm stuck waiting an hour+ for an update.
Deleted Comment
The problem is latency.
In a world where I am not even happy with the latency, or delay on most of the Code Editor, Keyboard, Screen, Display etc. And Gaming Display Monitor being 120Hz and trending towards 240hz+. We are not even anywhere close to solving latency issues in a local environment, let alone one that is separated by a fibre Optic.
And I not sure about "dreaded" the 20min update, on a decent Internet connection, most of the time is no longer in the network, but CPU decompressing the Data and installing it. But they way update are package are still optimise for minimal bandwidth, not minimal user time.
I dont think the problem with Gaming industry is Distribution or Delivery with Cloud Gaming. It is with the forever increase in Asset Prices. Middleware Engine helped Software Gaming Development cost to stabilise. But the Asset, especially Graphics will need ways to dramatically reduce its time and cost.
Actually, this is more or less solved. https://parsecgaming.com/ works really well over a local network. I use a raspberry pi as a thin client to stream games to my tv from a windows vm in my closet. I cant even tell a difference. Its not just for games either; its basically a gpu accelerated remote desktop.
They claim it works really well for remote servers (they even let you lease environments I think) too. For less intensive games, it probably works fine, but for more latency sensitive games, Im sure you can feel the lag.
Deleted Comment
One of my gaming friends who is a big fan of Stadia loves it because it means that even though they travel a lot, they will be able to play [enter big aaa pc game] from the comfort of their hotel room (they travel a lot).
Personally, I think I might be tempted to use stadia for another reason : I love FPSs but I have abandoned pc gaming in favor of consoles. I will try to use Stadia in order to play Doom eternal : this way I can play with a mouse and keyboard without having to invest the time, money, space and energy to build a gaming pc.
I used to have a cheaper laptop back in the olden days so I subscribed to a service called OnLive. It worked like Stadia where the cloud would host and render your game and you could play it online. I loved it! I wish it hadn't gotten bought out and canceled. Doesn't work for certain types of games, obviously, but it's great for most casual things.
Obviously not my thing but we can’t ignore the rest of the world.
Fortnite on mobile says otherwise
My generation (born in early 70's) was the first to really come up with access to video games pretty much as a given. We had space invaders etc in the arcades (or wherever else they could fit a cabinet), hand-held Nintendo and basic home consoles in primary school and then of course came the boom with PC, PS, X-Box and all that followed.
But a lot of people only a few years older than me are just as dismissive about games now as they were then - this is kids' stuff, a waste of time and money. I'm not an obsessive gamer, but I do play every now and then and I absolutely see games as just another option on the entertainment landscape.
And being that older people weren't into them, I guess I'd always had the thought in the back of my mind that games were something you grew out of, like binge drinking or not caring about your retirement (your examples may vary). But the other day I was playing with friends and I looked around at these ~50 year olds and realised we're never going to "grow out" of this - particularly if the hardware and software just keep improving the way they have.
So for me one of the big reasons that gaming will keep growing is because those older, non-gaming generations will die out, replaced by new generations who start gaming ever earlier while eventually you may find yourself playing call of duty with a platoon of 80+ year-olds.
Even games that seem "new" don't feel new. I played "Baba is You". Got maybe 50 levels in. It did have new ideas but at its core it felt like I was playing Adventures of Lolo NES from the mid 80s.
VR has added "presence" and being in new places feels novel as well as using hands instead of joypads but there's so few good well made titles and I'm sure that novelty will wear off as well.
I've tried to compare this to movies and TV. I'm not tired of movies and TV. I think the biggest difference is games are about the game, movies and TV are about the story. Games can have good stories but the majority are pretty crap and generally the more story the less game. I don't generally play for the story.
But among all the games that tried to challenge this in the last 10-15 years, Disco Elisium did it the best. It's not just a good story in a shape of a game: it's a very engaging gameplay, built very organically around a story and it's world and characters.
It's promising that there's many indie games that really push the frontiers of the gaming experiences one can have. E.g. This War of Mine and Firewatch were really big experiences for me, in terms of what stories a game can tell while being quite novel on the gameplay front.
And sure, I also play a lot less than I used to. But there are still fantastic games out there worth playing. I loved Hollow Knight and Cuphead and Hyper Light Drifter. And they all were created by people who grew up with the same games as I did.
When I was a kid they were simple and clumsy. I hit puberty in the 80s as games started to come into their own and the industry formed a bit of an identity. In my 20's (the 90's) there was this flurry of activity and games started to be a bit cool and not just for kids and geeks.
By my 30's, games had started making a bit of money and the industry got more professional. Now I'm in my 40's and gaming is kind of bloated and complacent and compromised, but still capable of amazing things, much more amazing than 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
Plus gaming is one of our generation's biggest contributions to culture. Really, it's that and hip hop. Everything else is just a sub genre, but those are two sensational contributions, imo.
For examples, try Paris and Sapienza missions in Hitman 2016. Or GTA 5, which will be an amazing snapshot of what 2010s were like in the US.
1) even if it's entertainment, I think the deep value is .. as a kid thing. It's not dismissive, I just think that gaming value has limits. It's a dreamy world you interact with and that fits the younger brain. As adults you'd rather master the real world more.
2) I find games today not much more original than in the past, it plateau-ed somehow [0] and they're mostly selling more technical oomph to justify new things.
[0] to be honest I interact very lightly with games, only a cousin younger than I show me some stuff, this plus the fads you can hear about online.
Do you really think a PS5 game will be that much more enjoyable than a PS2 game ? The other question .. well you answered it. You and your friends are still into them.
Can be, absolutely.
I played Read Dead Redemption 2 last year. There's a wild west cowboy outlaw game in there somewhere with a storyline that you can finish, but what completely blew my mind is how stunningly beautiful it is, how beautiful the world you're riding around in is, and how ugly human encroachment on nature is. Because as time progresses in the game, the frontier moves a little bit further, more trees are felled, more clearings made, more houses built, more railway tracks are laid, more humans, more civilization, more stinking cities.
You absolutely could not make a game like that on a PS2. You need a 4K screen and hi-res textures and HDR lighting to really make the world pretty, to really make you care about that world.
I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch as well. It's also an open-world game, and because it has infinite draw distance, they've managed to craft a world where no matter where you stand, you can see something interesting in the distance. I have never played a game that made me be so excited to explore and to get sidetracked as that game. The actual gameplay is also expertly bite-sized, so it doesn't matter if you play for 15 minutes or 15 hours, you still have the same sense of progression.
You absolutely could not make a game like that on a GameCube. You need hardware enough to do a seamless open world with infinite draw distance and no loading screens, otherwise the experience just doesn't work, just wouldn't be able to show you all it has to offer all at once.
1) Everything has its limits. There are seven basic plots[0] and while human creativity has an amazing ability to retell them in different ways, after a while you definitely start to see patterns. The real world is great and I definitely keep up with current affairs etc, but if you look too closely in any direction things are kind of messed up. Sometimes a dreamy world is a nice place to be, particularly if you can get there without risking too much damage to yourself.
2) I guess every art form is constrained by its boundaries - you could say that nothing much has happened in portaiture in the last 600 years. I think that story telling is getting better in gaming, and player choice and branching is definitely something that keeps pushing outwards. The whole online/collaborative scene is something that we've wanted from the start and is really only being solved satisfactorily now.
> Do you really think a PS5 game will be that much more enjoyable than a PS2 game?
Not necessarily - some old games are great, and the whole retro-gaming craze is a testament to this - but that will only feed the cumulative growth of games. People will be playing the classics and the new releases.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
2) Yes and no. I think this comes around to the fact that there are only so many stories and that there have been original games but they tend not to be big. The big genres in games have been pretty well defined and while original things do get introduced, most are refinements. Also execution matters much more than original content in games and that seems to be hit and miss.
Personally I went through a period of about 15 years where I gamed very little. A time when my kids were young and work was much more demanding. I got back into gaming maybe 6-7 years back when my kids were old enough to have their own interests and I professionally became confident enough that I didn't need constant study. So it might be something that changes as you grow.
Your 1st argument could be made for watching television. Television shows also range from self-learning to toddler cartoons to historical dramas.
To me, it seems like an absolutely astonishing achievement of humanity, one of the marvels of this world. Completely mindblowing. And yet the reaction I get from a lot of people, e.g. my older relatives, but also people in their 30s and 40s, is of complete indifference - "meh, games are for kids". I struggle to understand that.
Gaming got me into programming (mods are fun).
This can be typically said about the mainstream AAA market but much less so about indie games from small teams.
The PS5 will be the first console to support VR at launch. Thats a huge difference. VR games are light night and day compared to flat screen gaming.
TV is something I can have on while I work on responsibilities around the house (dishes, cooking, putting things away, for example), while eating dinner, and in the background while I'm working on graphic design or programming for various personal projects.
I can't do those things and play games at the same time, like I can with TV. Sure I could watch other people play games via Twitch, but that just tends to annoy me because those people waste so much time doing what I wouldn't do, or trying to figure things out, or saying dumb crap to try to gain an audience, so I've never really gotten into it (I know I'm in the minority there).
I do still play games, but it's a lot less time than it used to be.
You say that your gaming time has declined. Has your time watching tv declined comparably? Which of the two - gaming or tv - would you say is more important in your life?
My gaming has declined to zero, and my time watching TV has increased greatly. TV is much easier to make into a shared experience than video games. You can also find informative non-fiction TV, while nearly all games are fiction with relatively simple plots.
I think this article cherrypicks and makes all kinds of wild extrapolations to get to the unwarranted conclusion that gaming will "take over." The most glaring in my mind it doesn't address the kinds of lifestyle changes that happen as people age, that are extremely relevant to the overall uptake of media like video games.
Case in point: modern console games have been trying to avoid pushing loot box mechanics as much as possible. (mobile gacha games are a bit more complicated, but even those have been made substantially less greedy)
"AAA" games are MASSIVE undertakings of world building, art production, coding, integration, and, of course, financing.
Very similar to movies and, well, goddamn everything of any complexity in our economy, a cartel has formed.
There are only a handful of AAA "studios/producers".
While there are outstanding single player narrative experiences leveraging the format to further the narrative, there's nothing like a good TV show or movie for joint attention.
When enjoying a narrative with friends or a loved one many people will not want to pause to argue furiously over what dialogue choice to make or how to deal with a moral dilemma.
Games are a fantastic medium. But there have limitations, just as every other medium does.
Remember when radio was going to make the written word obsolete? Or TV kill off sound-only formats and movie theaters?
The medium is an integral part of the message. Video games are a new medium that will be added to the mix, not replace it, just as every media before it.
I think there is definitely a space for interactive movie style games.
I want Man of Medan on Stadia!
I think we're living in a golden age to be honest.
If I had to pick one of them to actually make this complaint against it would be computer (AI) generated content optimized for clicks on video websites (think kids videos on youtube).
I have no moral issue with time spent on games. My son plays quite a lot and I think that's fine.
I have zero interest in them though. There are a lot of reasons for this, but they aren't moral reasons - just preferences. I'd note that this also reflect in my lack of interest in board/card games.
I know a lot of people like me, from all age groups - they'll watch video content but have no interest in playing games. I think that the article author misses that.
do you have articles to read about that ?
There is a huge population of people who are mobile gamers and it’s not the demographic of 10-20 year olds. It’s middle aged folks.
- emotional investment. Experiences like the last of us are much greater than any critically acclaimed tv show imo. And this is because of the limitations of the tv medium. A video game gets you more emotionally invested because you are active when playing. Perhaps interactive movies are a compromise.
- boardgames, websites and UI. Remember back then when all websites were using flash and all looked different? It was pretty cool. Yet you still had to learn a new UI for every website you visited. Nowadays all websites seem to exhibit the same UI and everybody (even my grandmother) is browsing the web. A header, a nav bar, a home button, a register button, a login button, etc. I feel the same about boardgames. When you get into a new boardgame you know you’ll have to 1/ read the rules 2/ play one game to learn and 3/ profit. Videogames are the opposite. Each game is a totally new experience, even in terms of menu or configuration or controller setup. Your friend has a different console? You’ll have to learn a new controller. It’s way harder to invest yourself in videogames, or to start a new videogame.
Investing heavily into a long running video game is more intensive than long running film. Finding the right form for those experiences that isn't totalizing in it's presentation could help. A 3hr run and done episode of red dead might be more consumable.
> Most media categories are confined by three challenges. First is their finite length. At a certain point, you reach the last page of a book, last episode of a TV show, or end of a podcast.
This is a feature, not a bug. With the massive, coordinated attack of the attention economy on everyone's focus, I predict a new wave of burned victims who voluntarily eject from "hedonistic treadmill" type games where you play all day long and never reach the end in order to go back to completing wholesome experiences.
There's a whole generation to still discover what an end game screen looks like, but once they've seen a great and hard earned one, it's hard to go back on that satisfaction.
In the former kind of games, indeed infinite length is not an advantage, but I think in the latter two kinds, it is.
Background updating should be a thing. It is available on every major console. It never works. That can be fixed.
Additionally, there have been rumblings about where innovation is going to surface in the next generation of consoles. One of the more consistent themes is the handling of downloads; it'll be easier for developers to "shard out" their game into the components that, say, a particular mode or level or segment need, in order to get players into the game as quickly as possible. It may be a 50gb game, but you'll only have to download 3gb of it to get started.
We're seeing some of this on the XB1/PS4 today, but usually its very binary: Ready to Play, then Full Download. Next gen consoles will get much more specific and optimized. I believe (don't quote me on this) Sony has outright said that their goal is: you buy a game and you play it instantly, with no cloud rendering/streaming; just really smart handling of downloads and packaging.
The most ironic thing about gaming over the past generation is that games always used to be like this: you buy a disk/cartridge, and you're playing. Nowadays, you buy a disk, the disk has to install to the drive, then there's a day 1 update; its a total mess. We'll see how the next generation looks, but I doubt very much the situation will look much better for people with bad internet. If you've got great internet though, maybe we'll be close to the way it looked in the past.